One day, after all his hard work, he was with a band of volunteers when he saw that he had a telephone message from the bone marrow search coordinator at Stanford. Drew gathered everyone around to hear what he was sure was good news. “Hi, Mr. Drew,” the message said. “I just wanted to confirm that we have exhausted our search capability and there’s nothing else we can do. I’ll have a hospice nurse call you. Sorry, and good luck.”
How do you say good-bye to your life, to the people and things that form your identity? It was an impossible question that Drew had to answer as he sat in his apartment boxing his possessions away in September 2003. Good-bye books. Good-bye college photos. Good-bye friends. In a sad twist of fate, he also had to say good-bye to Sammy, his chocolate-brown Chesapeake Bay retriever, who had to be put to sleep after being diagnosed with cancer.
With no bone marrow donor found, Drew’s odds of recovery had plummeted from slim to the cusp of none. Most people would have just taken Stanford’s advice at that point, contacted a hospice, and called it a day. But Drew was not ready to die yet. As fate would have it, his half sister, Alexa, had been working at the transplant center at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and she told him about another option: an experimental procedure known as haploidentical transplantation. The procedure involved taking someone with only half the matching chromosomes and using him as a donor.
To prepare for the transplant, Drew would have to undergo more debilitating chemo, and even then the odds were frightening—the chance of engraftment is lower, and there’s more risk of dying from complications. But it was a chance he was willing to take. And another of his half siblings, an importer in Chicago named Michael Gicewicz, volunteered to be the bone marrow donor.
Drew resumed chemo treatments, slipping in and out of consciousness. One day he woke up to find his entire body had begun shaking uncontrollably, and he could not move. Drew came out of the episode to find his mother at his side. “I can’t do this anymore,” he told her, crying. It was too much, too painful. But with the transplant just a couple of weeks away, she urged him to hang on.
Two days before the transplant, the hospital called Drew to tell him that his half brother, Michael, had mononucleosis and that it would be months before he could be up to the surgery required for his donation. Devastated, Drew dialed Alexa to tell her the news. She didn’t skip a beat. “I’ll be your donor, Eric,” she said. Two days before Christmas, Drew received Alexa’s stem cells through a catheter in his chest. It would be three months before he would know if the stem cells had grafted, and he knew the odds were low. But he had no idea how low he could get.
During his treatment in Seattle, he began getting strange calls from credit card companies thanking him for his application. Drew shrugged it off as best he could until the collection agents started arriving at his door. There were a half dozen accounts opened in his name, with almost $10,000 in charges. “Please stop this!” Drew told one of the banks on the phone. “I’m in a hospital dying!”
But there was no stopping this thief. Here Drew was, on the verge of death, and someone was stripping away his last shred of humanity. He felt that his identity was being taken on every level. The disease was robbing him of his life. Some criminal was stealing his identity. And the medical system had swiped his individuality. He wasn’t even Eric Drew anymore; at the hospital, they just called him Patient Room 232.
Late one January night, as snow came down outside his window, Drew’s anger boiled over. He began throwing things, breaking glasses until he was exhausted. There was no more energy left. He was sick of being angry, sick of blaming the system and the hospital workers and anyone else in his line of sight. I can point fingers everywhere, he thought, but where will it get me? To my grave. This is not how I’ll go. I won’t be a victim anymore. I’m going to fight back.
During his treatment in Seattle, he began getting strange calls from credit card companies thanking him for his application. Drew shrugged it off as best he could until the collection agents started arriving at his door.
Having worked in banking, Drew knew how to take action. He ordered up a credit report and found the address where his imposter was receiving his mail. Against his loved ones’ wishes and his doctor’s orders, Drew had his mom drive him to the address, in a poor part of town. Weak from chemo, he pounded on the front door, not even knowing what he’d do if someone answered. No one did. Drew had the mail rerouted to his own address and, with the bills in hand, uncovered the trail of the identity thief’s purchases.
Drawing on his marketing skills, Drew sought the help of a local TV news station, which broadcast his story on the air. They filmed Drew in a wheelchair outside his hospital, pleading for information. Sure enough, the calls came in—many of them from crackpots. Still, Drew had to follow each lead. One of them was from an anonymous tipster who claimed to have photos of the person who fit the profile. When Drew told his family he was going to meet this character on the Seattle docks, they thought he was crazy. But as much as Nicole feared for his well-being, she could see that, in a strange way, the identity theft was bringing Drew back to life. She saw a glimpse of the old Eric, the one who wasn’t sick, the proactive go-getter who wouldn’t take no for an answer. “OK,” Nicole told him, “but if you don’t call me in an hour, I’m going to call the police.”
